The invention relates generally to structured document generation software applications. More particularly, it relates to improvements in syntax generation and management of structured document objects.
Structured documents are those whose content, format and syntax must follow certain required guidelines set forth, for example, by government entities, like the Department of Energy (DOE), or a corporation, like the Boeing Company. The DOE, for example may have several different styles of documents with similar and disparate rules for how those documents they should appear and what their content should be, ranging, for example, from policy oriented documents to nuclear power plant maintenance documents.
Numerous document creation and management systems have been developed with widely varying levels of sophistication. It is desireable to use structured document systems in those situations where it is imperative to provide the writer relief from the burden of constantly referring to a source document for formatting rules (arrangement of objects in a document and their appearance) or to a grammar reference for proper syntax (generically the arrangement of objects, such as words, in a sentence and the proper form of those words).
A common necessity for writers of technical manuals, for example, is the selection of proper verb forms when changing the tense of a sentence or changing the use of the sentence content from a descriptive form to an active form. For example, consider the following heading that might appear in a document relating to bicycle maintenance, "Removing Grease from the Bearing." Below this heading may be an action sentence which reads, "The mechanic may remove grease from the bearing by soaking it in solvent." In this example, the heading and the action sentence use two different forms of the same verb, "remove". It is preferable for the writer to not have to be concerned with which syntax rules to apply to yield the proper verb form, as for a heading or an action sentence, when specifying the use of the grammatical elements of the sentence: actor, verb, direct object, etc.
Structured documents are often created by selecting portions of other documents with "cut and paste" technology. Other approaches include the "hot link" or "publish and subscribe" features of some of the advanced word processing systems wherein a document deriving some of its content from an initial document will have that derived content changed or updated if it is altered in the initial document. Still other methods utilize traditional report generation capabilities of database management software capable of storing and reporting sentences and paragraphs. Also, powerful outlining software, such as "MORE", is used to provide a desired overall structure of the document, but the writer must still be concerned about the format and syntax at the sentence level. No known structured document system permits generation of documents from a list of steps containing the generic content of each step to which can be applied predefined syntax and format requirements for that specific document. Such an approach would provide flexibility in the use of a single set of content paragraphs to create numerous documents with different defined structures, relieving the writer from the burden of implementing syntax and format rules when generating each document and making storage of the documents more compact.